I have a couple of questions, any help would be hugely appreciated…
- We were taught to make our models out of one single clean mesh, this means no exposed edges like in this image:
However one of my old tutors told me that “this is more common than you would think”, and in the excellent ‘Create a current gen hot rod’ modelling tutorials, the guy (sorry, can’t remember his name) leaves hundreds, if not thousands of these ‘messy edges’. Creating ‘single’ meshes often increases my polycount substantially (and can be very time consuming when working purely with quads). How important is it, is it an issue in modern engines like UE4?
-If so, to what extent does it affect rendering time?
-Will I get hit with a load of t-vert warnings when I try exporting as an .FBX?
- Exactly how ‘low’ should my low-poly models be?..
I’ve read elsewhere that the only way to know for sure is to test in the engine to see how your framerate is, but this isn’t very helpful for the poor sod slaving away at Max (in this case me). It leaves me suffering with severe “polycount anxiety”. Getting it wrong means starting the whole dam workflow again from scratch.
-As a rough rule of thumb, how many polys can UE4 handle on screen at the same time without significant performance loss -are we talking 100k or 1 million?
-I know static meshes can be huge, but my game is sea-based …that means my ships, subs, and planes are all floating/flying -will this make a significant difference?